Entertainment

Washington Post Announces Personalized News Aggregation Site

The Washington Post announced Friday it will launch Trove, a site that aggregates news and enables users to personalize their news stream based on their interests. The site, which is currently in private beta, is expected to launch in March.

The announcement highlights a trend among news publishers looking to personalize news consumption based on social connections and topical interests. Trove combines aggregated stories picked by editors, along with the ability for users to select from "channels" they are interested in, through a simple on-boarding process that asks the reader, "What do you care about?"

The homepage presents these two content types side by side, fulfilling the readers' need for serendipitous discovery of content as well as feeding their want for content they are interested in. It's aiming to achieve the balance between news that editors think you should know about versus the news you want to know about.

Of course, the service also integrates social conversation. In the sign-up process, users connect their Facebook accounts, which enables them to then view the conversations taking places around stories in the channels they've selected. It also uses your Facebook profile to determine content you might be interested in based on what you've selected in the interests of your Facebook profile.

Personalized Content

Using a quiz-like selection process between stories, the site asks users to select the topics they want to follow. The selection shows the user both the topic and a story example and asks which story the user would prefer. He or she can select one or the other, both or skip them all together. Based on the user's selections, Trove builds a stream of channels with stories that link out content from across the web. It also uses an algorithm to suggest related channels that the user might be interested in keeping up with.

That's the interesting part. The content comes from all around the web (more than 10,000 news source, according to the Wall Street Journal), and not just The Washington Post's site, which is also likely why the company built it as a separate product. However, integrating this feature into the site may have given it more exposure, rather than attempting to create another destination portal.

Users can filter their channels and customize them by selecting what is included and what isn't as part of the channel, changing the stories that go into the layout. Users can even select the source for a specific channel. For example, if I really enjoy The Guardian's coverage of Egypt, I could select that as a "must have" or an "avoid" to further filter my channel.

The Post invested between $5 million to $10 million in the product, taking quite a gamble to build a destination for a place where the reader is able to personalize the content. The gamble isn't necessarily on personalized content itself because that's nothing new. In fact, most of the recent sites that let readers personalize their consumption have been largely built as apps for iPads, with the likes of the Flipboard, the coming of News.me and Pulse.

Social Dialogue

Though Trove is taking a stab at creating a personalized news environment, its social integration has a ways to go. Of course this is still very early for a product that's in beta, but if it is to capture a wider audience and provide utility for readers, it will have to include features that are more innovative than simply being able to see the conversations around stories and being able to add comments on channels. The dialogue should be more social and integrated into the consumption experience. Right now, its social aspects feel a lot like a forum.

Trove doesn't quite fulfill the promise of its name: a newfound treasure. It's far too similar to other aggregation news sites out there, most notably Google News. The utility of Trove isn't different enough from other aggregators, aside from its user interface and the ability to easily filter content.

If the site is truly about helping users find the signal in the noise, it will use the selected interests to build more focus in the channels created, rather than continuing to add a stream of content based on the user's interests on the main page.

Perhaps the treasure trove in the site is yet to be found. The idea is to build a product that helps surface and amplify quality and interesting content. Right now, however, Trove does not effectively execute its goal to find a signal through the noise.

Mashable
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